AT70 Extra: Adventuring Against the ’70s (Part Three)

It bulges with opportunity. Bulges!

Originally published 12/19/22 on Substack

Hey folks! Once again, I’ve written too much and posted too many pictures (despite trying to keep them to a minimum) that Gmail will cut this post short. If you’re reading this via email, please click on the banner to read it in full on the site. This is the last in this series, and despite being only tangentially related to my newsletter’s ostensible purpose, I hope you’ve found it interesting. An honest to god actual film post is coming up soon! 

In Part One of this series, I went over five different types of prewritten ttrpg adventures, and in Part Two, I looked at why each of those came up short as the basis for an Against the ’70s adventure. Today, I’m going to get at what should be at the core of such an adventure, which should throw into relief exactly why the five types I identified won’t work as-is. 

A quick review: what is Against the ’70s as a ttrpg concept? It’s a game that draws from all 1970s movies and TV shows, positing a what-if: what if all these characters lived in the same world? What if they formed teams in order to take down dangerous monsters and villains? What if John Shaft, Regan MacNeil, and Jonathan E. teamed up to fight the Tall Man? What if Billy Duncan, Kermit the Frog, and Laura Mars got together to take on the Death Bed, the Bed that Eats¹? That’s a perfectly cromulent elevator pitch; I’d play it, but then of course I would. But what’s underneath that? What’s holding this concept together, if anything? And if that concept can be identified, how can we construct adventures based on it? 

This is basically the game.

Not to get too pedantic/academic/sidetracked, but this is an important question. You can play a Star Wars ttrpg game with any ruleset. Let’s say you use D&D. But: how many of the systems within D&D that make it D&D would get in the way of your Star Wars game expressing its inherent Star Warsness? Does the leveling system not make sense for that universe? Do things like Armor Class and hit points mess with the desired emulation? You can change all these things, of course, but that’s friction, resistance. At a certain point, you should just design your own game (cough). So, that said, what is it about all of these ’70s references that we can bake straight into the game? 

I have an answer to this. Surprisingly, it’s not a great answer. Perhaps even more surprisingly, I think it’s the best answer. It’s definitely the answer I want to go with, which I guess trumps everything else anyway. The answer is this: all these 1970s characters, creatures and inspirations are held together by (what I’m going to call) common Western story structure. Now, what do I mean by that phrase? By story structure, I mean how a story is organized and what that organization means: very roughly, I’m talking scenes, acts, rising tension, climax, the whole magillah you probably learned in English class. By Western, I mean European/North American; different cultures, like in Japan or countries in West Africa, have developed very different ideas about constructing stories². By common, I simply mean mainstream; you see it in movies, tv shows, books, seemingly everywhere. By contrast, experimental films and “arthouse” films often eschew this structure. (For the rest of this post, I’ll refer to this as simply “story structure” for ease of reading.) 

So, to be clear, by story structure, I’m talking about stories that have a beginning, middle and end, that are sometimes divided into a number of acts (usually but not always three), built around scenes, and start with a low amount of tension that gradually rises until it peaks at a climax, after which the tension dissipates because the story is effectively over. It’s that classic mountain-shaped graph you’ve likely seen a million times.

I’ve always had issues with this and, as you will probably be able to tell from the text below, I have my own take on it.

Let’s get an objection out of the way, one I raise against myself: yes, this is an extremely general, even basic, concept to make the core element of a ttrpg adventure. It’s like saying, “The core of my adventure is going to be a party of characters going on a quest.” Oh, dip? Really, you trailblazer you? Seriously: isn’t this reinventing the wheel? Don’t ttrpg adventures already do this?

Well, I’d argue they try, with varying degrees of success. Certainly, story structure, by its very ubiquity, has ingrained itself into most of us. When a GM puts the Big Bad Monster at the end of the dungeon, that’s story structure talking. A lot of prewritten adventures follow story structure in a high level way, organizing the encounters from an introductory hook to climactic confrontation. But how often does a game session feel like story structure during play? As I mentioned in Part Two, game sessions often feel like a sine wave rather than a mountainside. I think part of this is because players have a tendency to slow down the narrative, by getting sidetracked into irrelevancies, bogged down into discussions, or activities like the classic and highly undramatic “go into town and shop for supplies.” This is not inherently a bad thing! It’s a sign of player engagement. But it does cause friction if the intent of the adventure is to climb the narrative mountain³.

I’m tellin’ you, this book is freakin’ great. Grab a copy.

Now, there are a number of games that adopt story structure more formally within their rules. For example, Primetime Adventures ⁴ explicitly uses an act structure for each “episode” (game session), and Monster of the Week suggests that GMs, for each scenario, write down an escalating series of bad events, inevitably climaxing in some horrible destruction if the characters don’t do something about it⁵. Steve Dee’s absolutely fantastic Partners is a ttrpg about TV-style procedural mysteries and has some very clever ideas about using act structures and tension⁶. Yet, I still feel like story structure-based games are missing something I want for Against the ’70s⁷. 

What is that something? It’s not acts, and it’s not the build-up to a big climax, as important as those things may be. I think what’s missing is the mountain. 

What does that line in the Freytag diagram represent? Well, according to the picture, “rising action,” but screw that. It represents chronological forward momentum of the story, but also something else: rising tension. Tension not just across the scene or the encounter, but the entire story or session. Tension that doesn’t start at “zero” with every new scene, and doesn’t reset to “zero” once the scene is completed. Tension that carries over from scene to scene, building and building until the narrative can no longer contain it and it explodes. 

That is the thing that I want for Against the ’70s. 

Tension is an audience-facing element of story structure, a feeling of apprehension about the future of both the scene and the overall story, whether it will end well or poorly. Characters in a story may be tense, but that has nothing to do with the concept of tension here. Rising tension, then, I define as the “minimum level” of tension in each scene, and that minimum level should always be greater in the current scene than in the previous scene. The ragtag rebellion strike team that’s sneaking around the enormous space cannon, looking for a way to destroy it, may be having a breather right now between avoiding patrols, but they’re still in danger, so there’s still tension. And that tension is much greater than back at the beginning, when they were introducing themselves to each other. 

Me writing this post.

Tension is created through three elements⁸. The first are obstacles. I trust that’s obvious, and how that manifests in a ttrpg is also obvious. The second and third are the financial-sounding stakes and options. Tension is core to what I want out of an AT70s adventure; stakes and options, I think, are how to achieve it. 

Let’s start with stakes. Stakes are why the characters even care about what’s happening in the story. They’re an expression of a character’s wants, needs, and fears. They can drive the plot, especially if the antagonist’s stakes are the direct opposite of the character’s, resulting in a zero-sum game. And of course, they allow an audience to also care about what’s happening. If an audience doesn’t care what’s happening, they’re not going to be an audience for long.

Yet, none of those reasons are important in this case. Stakes are important here because they force characters to make choices. Often, these choices are usually reflected in implicit or explicit questions like, “Are you going to go on or give up?” and “Is there a limit to what you will do in the pursuit of your goal?” But stakes also drive choices in more mundane ways. What’s the best way to get to the evil wizard’s tower, follow the river or go through the forest? Do we go across the tower’s drawbridge, or try to get inside from the roof? Should we try to kill the evil wizard, or try to reason with her? Stakes will inform which choices are made.

This is where options come in. Characters make choices from the options available. But options inevitably begin to disappear. Options disappear not only due to outside factors such as antagonists and unforeseen events (“the bridge collapsed!”), but because of the characters themselves. Making a particular choice precludes other choices; alternate choices are eliminated from consideration. If we take the river, we don’t take the forest. If we take the drawbridge, we won’t know what’s on the roof. If we try to reason with the evil wizard, we lose the advantage from going in guns blazing. What is a story but the gradual sloughing off of paths until only one remains? What is a climax but a single path, chosen among an infinite number of possibiities, that culminates in one of two outcomes, success or failure? What is tension but the gnawing question of when and how this is going to end?⁹

The very act of making choices creates tension because each choice closes off alternate choices and brings the end of the story one step closer. Therefore, any AT70s game must incorporate, via hardcoded rules, the gradual disappearance of options the characters, and by extension, the players, can take.

This, of course, appears to slam straight into my desire for a game where the GM and the players have the freedom to generate the adventure at the table with little to no prep. Can this circle be squared?

I’ll be revisiting this soon, but not until next year and not under the “Adventuring Against the ’70s” series banner. Don’t worry, you’ll know it when you see it. Coming up next on Against the ’70s: Avanti! (1972, Billy Wilder). 

So you want a highly structured, extremely delimited TRPG…

…that’s completely freeform and swarming with player choice.

And also, you should win things by playing.